Monday, September 7, 2015

"'But the concept of . . .being happy’ — that was for modern people or movie stars. I.e., degenerates' Chast’s mother exclaims: 'Elizabeth Taylor! Seven husbands. Oy gevalt.'" Quotes from Chast's Can't we talk about something more PLEASANT? in a review by Alex Witchel in the New York Times 4/30/2014

Roz Chast, mostly known for her frequent cartoons in the New Yorker magazine, has written an award-winning graphic memoir whose subject is her aging parents. This memoir is a portrait of a family that looks back to Jewish immigration at the turn of the twentieth century and follows these immigrants' descendants as they move from tenements to suburbs, pursuing the American Dream.

Both parents were born in 1912 to Russian Jewish immigrants and met when they were children in East Harlem. They settled in an apartment off of Ocean Parkway in an area Chast describes as not at all contemporary trendy Brooklyn, but rather “deep” Brooklyn where they raised Roz, their only child.

A host of circumstances made Roz’s upbringing difficult: her parents were older when she was born, she was an only child. There had been an earlier pregnancy but the baby was born prematurely and died. Influencing the way her parents lived was their own backgrounds: they talked about how their parents had come with “nothing” and that growing up they had “nothing.” They had lived through the Depression and World War II. And both her parents lost relatives in the Holocaust.

In the complicated mixture of circumstance, culture and personality they behaved like many in their generation. They saved their money in bank accounts and were secretive about it, they held onto possessions far past their usefulness, they recited all kinds of bromides about health and wealth, and they (her father especially) were afraid of the world and its potential everyday calamities. They lived like there was a disaster waiting around the corner. To illustrate this propensity, and to highlight her own sense of its absurdity, Chast draws what she calls a Wheel of Doom with concentric circles that detail the everyday possible hazards of life from “choking due to laughter at a meal” to “gangrene – too tight wrist watch.”

What we have here is a story of America told through the tale of one family, exaggerated because it’s viewed through the lens of the comic cartoon. Graphic memoirs don’t lend themselves to wordy analysis on the part of the author, but rather to presentation. We get a glimpse of the immigrant generation. She says that although her mother’s father had been an engineer in Russia, here in America his English held him back and he could barely make a living. His wife worked as a presser in the garment district and cleaned people’s houses. The next generation, Roz Chast’s parents, climbed up the ladder of success. They were college graduates and became school teachers, and they raised their daughter in a rented apartment in Brooklyn. As far as they were concerned, they had made it. But their daughter knew that there was a world outside of Brooklyn. Eventually she moved to Connecticut with her own growing family so they could have more trees and grass, more space, and better schools.

This background sets up the bulk of the memoir which deals with her parents’ inevitable aging – their desire to be independent, the author’s guilt and worry about their still living in their apartment in Brooklyn into their early 90’s, and the author’s commitment to secure their future.

Is this a particularly Jewish story? It’s an interesting question. They certainly were not religiously observant. However there is a case to be made that to some extent they enacted a culturally Jewish legacy. They were educated and ambitious for their daughter. Chast states that her father was a high school language teacher of French and Spanish and could speak Yiddish, and there’s an occasional use of a Yiddish phrase. At one point she quotes her mother as having used the phrase “Oy Gevalt” (woe is me), a phrase that points back to their inheritance: the anxiety and anguish based on the lives of earlier generations. Roz Chast, born in 1954, can’t identify with the Jewish immigrant source of their anxiety. She found her parents clinging to their old thought patterns and behavior exasperating. But at the same time she knew they couldn’t help themselves – it was part of who they were - and she did the best she could to make their final years safe and endurable.

To watch a Youtube video of Roz Chast reading from Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant, click here.
To read an entry from the Jewish Virtual Library on the Jewish American family, click here.

People
George and Elizabeth Chast
Roz Chast - daughter of George and Elizabeth; author

"[W]hen I was much younger . . . even then I would wonder what kind of present you could possibly have without knowing the stories of your past." Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

Welcome

My name is Toby Anne Bird and I've been interested in memoirs for many years. I teach courses on autobiographical writing in New York, and I'm an amateur genealogist. I've created this blog to call attention to the many compelling memoirs about Jewish people, their communities, their history and their culture.

Genealogy and history are more than facts and figures. Memoirs help bring those facts and figures to life because they are eye-witness accounts that immerse their readers in lives lived. These primary sources help you understand life on the ground, so to speak - a time period, a geographical location, and/or a particular set of circumstances.

The memoirs that I post on this blog are ones I've read and recommend. Each post consists of a short review of the contents and is followed by lists of family names and geographical locations of interest to those involved in Jewish genealogy. I will occasionally also be posting documentaries and fiction that can enrich a genealogical or historical perspective.

I hope that lots of you out in cyberspace will find this blog useful. I expect in the beginning to post three times a week - on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, one memoir per post. I welcome your feedback, suggestions, and questions. This blog went live on 3/1/2010.

Toby Anne Bird, Ph.DYou can leave comments on the blog or e-mail me at toby.bird@ncc.edu.

4/12/2010: I now have posted reviews on 30 books and documentaries. I will now be adding reviews twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays instead of three times a week.

7/19/10: I now have now posted reviews of more than 50 books and documentaries. I will now be adding reviews once a week on Mondays.

9/5/11: I now have posted reviews of more than 100 books and documentaries. I will now be adding reviews twice a month on the first and third Mondays.

5/31/14: I now have posted reviews of more than 170 books and documentaries. I will now be adding reviews once a month on the first Monday.

11/6/15: This blog will be on partial hiatus. If I read a memoir that I think should be added, I'll add it. It's been a five year run.

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Blog Table of Contents: Alphabetical List of Reviews Posted

Abramovich and Zilberg, Smuggled in Potato Sacks: Fifty stories of the Hidden Children of the Kaunas Ghetto

Aciman, Out of Egypt

Adorjan, An Exclusive Love

Alban, Anya's War

Antin, The Promised Land: The Autobiography of a Russian Immigrant

Appelfeld, My Life

Apple, I Love Gootie: My Grandmother's Story

Apple, Roomates: My Grandfather's Story

Auster, Invention of Solitude

Bauer (director), The Ritchie Boys (documentary film)

Beer's The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust

Behar, An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba

Bendavid-Val, The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod

Benjamin, Last Days in Babylon: The History of a Familly, The Story of a Nation

Berg, Diary of Mary Berg: Growing up in the Warsaw ghetto

Berger, Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust

Bernstein H., The Dream

Bernstein H., The Invisible Wall

Bernstein, B. Family Matters: Sam, Jennie and the kids

Bernstein, S., The Seamstress: A Memoir of Survival

Berr, The Journal of Helene Berr

Bitton-Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing up in the Holocaust

Bloom, Out of a Doll's House

Brenner, The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope, and Survival in Theresienstadt

Brittain and Spotton (writer/director) Memorandum (documentary film)

Buergenthal, A Lucky Child: A memoir of surviving Auschwitz as a young boy

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Potentially Useful Books that are more Histories, than Memoirs - not reviewed.

Eliach, There Once Was a World: A 900-year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok, 1998. A National Book Award Finalist that recreates and documents the author's hometown shtetl in Lithuania that is the basis for the permanent exhibit called the "Tower of Life" at the U.S. Holocaust Museum.

Evans, The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South, 1973. A classic study of its subject, only intermittently autobiographical. The author grew up in Durham, North Carolina.

Margoshes, A World Apart: A Memoir of Jewish Life in Nineteenth Century Galicia, published in Yiddish in 1936; published in English in 2008. A very useful book written in a lively manner about life in Galicia which includes discussions of the Hassidic dynasties and other rabbinic authorities and their rivalries, the world of work beyond the realm of the synagogue, and the day to day life of the author's family.

Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelbaum, 1958. A day by day documenting of life and death in the Warsaw ghetto and what Ringelblum, a social historian and archivist of the ghetto, heard about the war outside the ghetto.